Chương 36: “What Remains (2)”

The kitchen's backdoor was easy to miss. Celestia only noticed it because there was a gust of wind coming from an enclosed space that wasn't from the closed windows. Outside was a small yard, enclosed on three sides by a low stone wall that had partially crumbled at the far end. A well sat in the center, the bucket and rope long gone. Around it, the remains of a garden that had clearly overgrown.

What might have once been neat rows of herbs or vegetables had become a dense thicket of overgrown shrubbery, dried stalks, and weeds that had grown tall, died, and grown over themselves in layers. Celestia moved along the edge of the shrubbery, scanning through the gaps between the branches. She almost walked past the first doll entirely. It was deep inside one of the bushes, tangled in the roots that had grown up and over it. The vines had wound around the doll's torso and one of its legs.

She had to set the spear down, reach in with her left hand, and work the roots loose one at a time. A few of the thinner vines snapped easily enough, but the thicker ones had dried into stiff coils that she had to peel back with her fingers. Thorns caught her sleeve and scratched the back of her hand in the process. The second was worse. She found it deeper in the thicket, almost entirely buried under a web of roots. Only the round shape of its head was visible.

This one required her to kneel beside the shrubbery and pull at the undergrowth piece by piece, untangling the doll from where the garden had swallowed it. Her right knee pressed against the hard soil and the pain flared dull and heavy, but she kept working until the last root came free. Both dolls were stiff with dried dirt. But nevertheless, Celestia carried them both back inside and placed them next to the others. Ten dolls now sat in a row along the bench. Some leaned against their neighbors.

A few had tipped slightly since she'd left, and she straightened them without thinking about it. She stepped back and looked at them. The system window had told her to find the dolls, and now she'd found them. It didn't specify if how many there were, but Celestia had a feeling that these were all of them. Plus, she was too tired to walk around any longer.

'So finding them isn't enough.' She pulled the bench from the opposite side of the table and sat down, facing the row of dolls across from her. She set the spear against the table's edge and rested her left hand flat on the warped wood. Celestia started to put the pieces together. Floors 1 through 4. She'd been thinking of them as individual trials designed to test survival in isolation. Floor 1 was starvation. Floor 2 was the arrow corridor. Floor 3 was collapsing floors. Floor 4 was carnivorous plants.

But now that she was on Floor 5, she realized things were completely different… An adult's perspective. A child wouldn't have seen it that way. To a child locked in a dark room with no food and dirty water pooling on the ground, it would have seemed large. The arrow corridor might've had an actual arrow trap, and the children might've struggled with fear that they would be riddled with arrows. The corridor upstairs, with its sharp turns and identical doors, would feel like a maze to a child.

And in haste to escape from the mansion, already weakened, they probably fell to some vines in the garden and never got up. The dolls in the trapdoor, were they left by the others? Abandoned? Or were they in a hurry to escape and didn't have any other choice? There was also the one in the kitchen, who Celestia assumes to have eaten food and might've just died from the shock of their stomach unable to handle it. Celestia looked at the dolls again.

'Made in the image of something once loved.' How they'd arrived here in the first place wasn't difficult to guess. The dolls were what remained of the ones left behind. And yet… she didn't have the full picture, and guessing further without more information would only lead her in circles. What she could say with certainty was that the Tower had taken something that had happened, or something close to what had happened, and built its boss trial around it.

'Why?' That was the part she couldn't answer. In the original novel, the Tower's trials had been straightforward for Arthur. Challenges that tested combat ability, willpower, and the occasional moral choice that conveniently aligned with Arthur's personality. The Tower had practically guided him through. Every reward was timely. Every difficulty was calibrated to push him just enough to grow without ever truly breaking him. Even in the academy lectures, the specifics of the boss trial had been glossed over.

The instructor had mentioned that Floor 5 was where most climbers failed, but the details, the type of trial, the conditions, the food or lack of it, were treated as irrelevant. It varied from climber to climber, they'd said. What mattered was whether you passed. Which meant no one deemed this part important enough for discussion. A mansion full of dolls and a trial written with careful, almost tender language.

'We look forward to your decision.' What decision? For the first four floors, the Tower's window always said it looked forward to "your endeavors," but it suddenly changed for the 5th? Now that she'd found them. It meant that the trial wasn't about finding them even though it said it did. It was about what she did next.

'What you are willing to choose.' Celestia stared at the row of small, battered shapes across from her. Button eyes and frayed seams and stuffing that leaked from open wounds in the cloth. Then, slowly, a thought took shape. These were aggrieved things. Whether they were real spirits or echoes or something else entirely, the Tower had placed them here with the concept of abandonment and forgetting.

'The ones who have been left behind.' They had been found, gathered, and placed together. But gathering wasn't the same as acknowledgment. Maybe what they needed wasn't rescue… Maybe they needed a proper end. A mourning. A funeral. Something that said, clearly and without ambiguity: you are seen, and you are being let go with intention rather than indifference. She was someone who now believed that souls existed, after all. Whether that belief carried any weight in this world, she didn't know yet.

A funeral needed things. Food for the departed, water for the journey, salt for purification. She'd absorbed enough from her previous life's passing interest in cultural rituals to know the broad strokes. She looked around the kitchen. The shelves were bare, the basin was dry, and there was no food to offer that. Water was also out of the question; the well outside had been dry for who knew how long. Salt? There wasn't any sign of it around the kitchen.

'So I have nothing.' She paused for a moment, staring at the ten small shapes lined up across from her. Then she exhaled through her nose.

'Fuck it. Let's make it spectacular.' Celestia reached into the inner pocket of her dress-armor and pulled out a firestarter. It was one of her father's gifts, different from the one in the dormitory. She stood up from the bench, tucked the firestarter into her left hand, and limped toward the kitchen's back wall where the old curtains hung in tatters. The fabric was dry and brittle. She tore a strip off with her teeth and one working hand, bunched it loosely, and set it against the base of the wooden counter.

Spark. The flame was small at first, curling along the frayed edge of the cloth before finding the dried wood beneath. The counter's surface, scarred and oil-stained from decades of kitchen work, caught faster than she expected. Within a minute, the fire had climbed to the shelves above. Within two, the wall was burning. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Celestia moved through the mansion and tore down every scrap of remaining fabric she could find: rotted curtains, fragments of upholstery, strips of wallpaper that peeled away at a touch, and fed them to the spreading flames. All of it was dry enough to be kindling. By the time she limped back through the front entrance and stepped into the overgrown yard, the mansion was fully ablaze. Flames climbed through the windows of the upper floor and started to move along the roofline.

The old wood groaned and cracked as support beams gave way, sending showers of embers into the air. Smoke rose in a thick column, dark against the featureless sky of the Tower's floor. The dolls were still inside, seated in their row on the kitchen bench. If she couldn't offer food or water or salt, then she'd offer this. A pyre. The mansion that had been their prison would serve as the vessel to send them off. Whatever remained of what they'd suffered here would burn with it.

Celestia watched the fire eat through the roof. A section of the second floor collapsed inward with a deep, resonant crack, and a wave of heat rolled across the yard. She was quite proud of herself for this.

'Hehehe.' Celestia blinked. The sound was faint. A high-pitched, and yet brief giggle. She turned her head, looking around the yard, but there was nothing. The shrubbery swayed from the fire's heat, but there was no one. She must've heard it wrong. Then, she heard the chime. [Floor 5 - Cleared] The system window appeared and vanished just as quickly. She also felt the instinctive awareness of where the black door waited.

Celestia turned away from the burning mansion and limped toward the far end of the yard, past the crumbled stone wall and into the dense vegetation beyond. Weeds and overgrown brush caught at her ankles, and she had to sweep the spear ahead of her to clear a path. The greenery was thick here, and it closed in around her as she pushed deeper. Then she saw it. A singular black door, standing upright in the middle of the vegetation with nothing attached to it.

Just the door, stark and solid against the tangle of green. So, just like always, she walked forward and sank into it. *"Hahahaha!" The laugh was loud and unrestrained, echoing off walls that didn't seem to exist.

"This candidate burned the whole thing down?!"

"She did." The second voice carried the flat tone of someone reading from a report.

"The candidate gathered all ten objects, arranged them in the kitchen, and then set fire to the structure. The entire building was fully engulfed within a few minutes."

"So fast!" The first voice wheezed.

"She's efficient, I'll give her that. Most of them don't even touch the dolls scared it'll curse them or whatever!"

"The trial parameters were satisfied," the second voice continued.

"The candidate demonstrated recognition, retrieval, and intentional resolution. The method was unorthodox, but the conditions for clearance were met." A third voice cut in, sharp and clipped.

"Unorthodox is generous. She destroyed the entire floor. The reconstruction alone will take considerable resources. I move to disqualify the candidate on the grounds of excessive damage to trial infrastructure." Silence followed for a moment. Then four voices spoke at once.

"Objection."

"Objection."

"I object as well."

"Denied." The third voice stiffened.

"You can't all just—""The trial doesn't specify preservation of the environment," a fourth voice said calmly, yawning.

"It specified that we would watch her make a decision."

"A very splendid cremation for those poor souls!" the first voice added, still chuckling.

"I haven't seen anything like that in… how many cycles has it been?"

"That isn't relevant," the third voice said. A fifth voice, quieter than the rest, spoke up.

"I agree with the motion to disqualify. The precedent this sets is—""Precedent?" The fourth voice again, sounding even more tired than before.

"There is no precedent. Has it been so long that you've forgotten what we're looking for?" The fifth voice paused.

"…Even so."

"The vote stands at four objections, two in favor of disqualification," the second voice said.

"Mother, your position?" A long pause.

"I abstain," the seventh voice said.

"Recorded. The motion to disqualify fails. The candidate's clearance stands." The first voice let out another laugh.

"Magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. What's her profile looking like?" * Name: Celestia Von Reingarde Race: Human Elemental Attribute: ክዐ፪ጎረጎፕሃ Synchronization: 9% Story Relevance: 26/100 Stats: Strength: H (91/100) Dexterity: H+ (99/100) Speed: H+ (41/100) Wisdom: F- (34/100) Aura: H- (40/100) Special Stats: Nobility: S+ (101/100) Active Skills: Noblesse Oblitère (S-Rank) Cooldown: 3 Days Description: Strike infused with Nobility so overwhelming that lesser beings crumble on contact.

Damage scales with rank difference. Plebeians may detonate. Effect: Instantly inflicts massive physical and spiritual damage weighted by hierarchical superiority. Targets may experience fear, humiliation, or sudden existential crisis. Knighthood (S-Rank) Slot Limit: 1 Sir Ozymandias Effect Cooldown: 1 Year Description: A princess bestows the peerage of knighthood as the highest honor. Once sworn, the bond can be invoked as a royal decree made manifest.

Effect: For a brief period, your anointed knight returns to the peak of their prowess; body and spirit restored to their finest state. When the grace ends, the borrowed perfection is reclaimed, leaving the knight heavily spent. Passive Skills: Faint Resistance (G) Concentration (G) Fatigue Recovery (H) Pain Resistance (G) Poison Resistance (G) Physical Recovery (G) Mental Recovery (H) * She closed the window and exhaled, barely anything changed, except that her synchronization had lowered to a 9%.

That was a good change, right? And for some reason, this time, she could feel that she could leave the tower.

'Finally.' Within the white space, she expressed her intent to leave and one moment she was in the waiting room, the next, the Tower's wall pushed her out at ground level as if she'd been shoved through a doorway. She stumbled forward, her left leg buckled on the uneven ground, and she dropped to one knee in the dirt. She looked up. The Tower's black surface stretched above her, still featureless and immense as the day she first entered.

Around her, the perimeter wall was visible in the distance, but this section was sparse. There was no guild checkpoint or any medic tents, she'd come out at one of the emptier stretches of the Tower's base. The Tower had no predetermined exits. Climbers who chose to leave were simply pushed out of the wall at ground level, and where they ended up was luck. Some emerged next to the Adventurer's Guild posts, steps away from medics and healers and hot food. Others ended up on the far side of the perimeter.

Celestia had landed somewhere in between, closer to one of Summit's commercial districts than to any medical facility. She pushed herself to her feet using the spear and looked down at herself. Her dress-armor was shredded in several places, stained dark with dried blood and dirt. Her right hand was still wrapped in crude leaf bandaging that had soaked through. One of her boots was gone, eaten through by acid on Floor 4, and her bare feet left red prints on the packed earth. She needed a carriage.

The perimeter road was not far. She could hear the rattle of wheels and the clip of hooves from the supply wagons and hired coaches that serviced the Tower's base. Injured climbers stumbling out of the wall were a normal sight around here. Celestia reached the road and raised her left hand. A carriage slowed. The driver, a middle-aged man with a sun-weathered face and a flat cap, looked her over. His eyes moved from the bloody bandages to the spear she was leaning on to her bare feet. His expression didn't change.

"Where to?"

"The business district, east block." The driver paused. His eyes flicked to the dried blood on her collar, then back to her face. Climbers in her condition usually asked for the guild's medical ward, or the temples where healing clergy worked for donation fees. The business district was in the opposite direction.

"Miss, are you sure you don't want me to—" A pouch of gold coins hit the seat beside him. The driver looked at the pouch. Then at Celestia. Then at the pouch again.

"Business district it is." Celestia climbed into the carriage. The cushioned seat took her weight, and for the first time in weeks, she was sitting on something actually comfortable. The carriage lurched forward. Outside the window, the Tower's base receded as the road curved toward the city proper. Celestia leaned her head against the carriage wall and closed her eyes. She wanted a proper meal. Something hot with actual flavor that wasn't stale bread and lukewarm water.

She wanted to sit at a table and eat with utensils. After that, she wanted to sleep in a bed with scented sheets and a pillow she could sink in. The carriage rattled over a rough patch of road, and the jolt sent a spike through her knee. She adjusted her position and let her head rest against the wall again. Her eyes stayed closed for the rest of the ride.